Air Force and Space Force seek a radical shift in how jets, missiles and satellites are designed

Now, Roper wants to make this sort of process a requirement for companies building any of the Air Force’s premier systems in the future. He is hoping to usher in a new era of weapons development in which computer-generated models — owned by the government and enabled by artificial intelligence technology — can test millions of possible designs in a virtual format before ever creating a prototype.

In this case, the outcome that seemed to wow him the most was the plane’s low price. Boeing’s Arlington-based defense division is known in the aerospace world for underbidding its rivals.

“For me, the Sputnik moment was looking under the hood at T-7,” Roper said. “The airplane came in at a much lower cost than we expected, which begs the question: how? That took me on the odyssey of how it was designed and assembled.”

What surprised Roper so much about the design process for the T-7 was the use of what’s known as “digital threading,” where designers created a digital twin for the jet before manufacturing it. Starting in a virtual format means they can modify and test the plane’s systems with various configurations over the course of its design.

Roper recognized that a mostly-digital design process represented a significant departure from the traditional way of doing things.

“There is an old adage in defense acquisition called ‘fly before you buy.’ It’s a caution that you ought to build something and test it out before you commit to buying it,” Roper said. “Today, you can digitally buy and fly before you even commit to buying that first prototype. Let’s do that in the military and then we can design things more frequently.​​”

The use of a digital thread in the design process allows for automated checks to happen in the background as the product is modified, essentially ensuring that as different parts of a plane or missile system are designed, they all fit together and don’t face integration problems.

Roper said that in the past, with the manual design of aircraft, small differences in parts that don’t fit together well can end up becoming big problems ― like when you are trying to put together a piece of furniture from Ikea and for some reason the holes don’t line up. Even a variance of a thousandth of an inch within a complicated system can create expensive headaches.

Mechanics can also learn how to assemble the plane digitally. For the Red Hawk, Roper said, mechanics were trained in a simulator to build the aircraft before it was ever put together in the real world.

“They achieved the same quality on their first airplane that would normally be achieved on the hundredth,” Roper said, because they came with the experience of having built the plane digitally.

Because of the approach, Roper said, the Air Force has been able to complete assembly and subsequent maintenance of the T-7 in record time that he described as “off the charts, not near any other airplane in recorded history.”

It remains to be seen whether the T-7 will live up to its expectations; it’s possible that the low price and faster assembly process could entail trade-offs in other areas.

But the Air Force and Space Force are moving ahead with applying this method to other system designs. One of them is the missile system that is going to replace the Minuteman III ICBM fleet. Roper said Northrop Grumman created a digital twin and tried out over 6 billion different variants of the new ICBM using artificial intelligence and machine learning to weigh the tradeoffs between cost and different possible characteristics.

And it is employing it in its design of a futuristic fighter jet that meant to follow currently-used jets like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, under a program called Next Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD. That program has progressed to the point where a physical prototype ― already designed, assembled and tested in a virtual system ― has been flown, Roper said Tuesday.

If this approach is expected to become the norm, it will require a significant shift for U.S. weapons-makers. An Air Force spokeswoman said the department does not yet have a written policy requiring digital design processes, but the department is working on one. Roper says he considers the new approach to be a mandate for which any exception requires his personal sign-off.

This kind of process shift ― particularly the related requirement that the digital technology be fully owned by the government ― could be controversial for large defense companies that prefer to own and profit from the intellectual property underlying their products.